


Through White Lens

by Koayyy



Category: Granblue Fantasy (Video Game)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Spirits, Zine: The Whole World in Your Hands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-16
Updated: 2020-04-16
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:41:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23647870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Koayyy/pseuds/Koayyy
Summary: After a body has become cold, their spirit wanders the world. They have forty-nine days until they move on. After Lucifer's death, he becomes a spirit that continues to be trapped by inaction. On the seventh day, he gains a body and has a glance of home. On the forty-ninth day, he disappears from the Sky Realm and waits in the garden he knows all too well.
Relationships: Lucifer & Sandalphon (Granblue Fantasy), Lucifer/Sandalphon (Granblue Fantasy)
Kudos: 30





	Through White Lens

**Author's Note:**

> This is my piece from [The Whole World In Your Hands](https://twitter.com/wmtsbzine/) zine, thank you for having me! 
> 
> Also happy 000 rerun! I still want Lucifer back.

When the last piece of his energy is used to utter the name of the one he holds the closest, he fully expects his consciousness to fade into nothing. He expects his sentience to come to an end, no matter the amount of burden that still rests on his soul. But like a silent flash of light, he gains something back.

He doesn’t deserve it, after how he failed his duty promised to the blue skies. But regardless of how he feels about it, his eyes open again. He twitches his fingers before he brings it up to his face. His ears can hear, but there should be no sound in this lonely temple. He stares at his hands, his hands that bare no trace of their original colour.

His hands are a dull grey, just like the walls of Canaan. Looking down at his own torso gives him a similar sense of... something unpleasant. He’s wearing the armour he usually wears, but they’ve also lost trace of their original colour. All the colour that should be on him has been replaced by the same dull grey.

Until he looks to his feet and sees the stain of red on it. It causes him to take a step back, but the red stain doesn’t follow his movement. The red stain remains on the floor.

Lucifer feels as if he’s floating in the sky, but he doesn’t possess his wings in the first place. His entire body is see-through, if it can still be called a body. Is this perhaps what the Skydwellers called a ‘spirit’, the leftover soul after death?

This isn’t a situation he ever predicted would happen, but then again, everything had started to veer towards the direction of chaos the moment the weapon was struck between his ribs. When he was talking to himself in front of the Seraphim Cradle.

The cradle. What happened to Sandalphon?

As if responding to the turbulence of feelings buried in his chest, he blinks out of existence for a second. Another second passes before he comes back, before he stands a distance away from where his last words left his mouth.

He stands in front of Sandalphon, ignoring the various stains that paint the floor. The six white wings adorning Sandalphon’s back are beautiful on him, their pure white glow repelling the gloom of Canaan. The look on his face is something Lucifer has never seen on him before, but then again, he’s not a good judge of Sandalphon anymore. 

After all, he hasn’t seen Sandalphon for at least two thousand years. He had locked him in Pandemonium, leaving him to wallow in his feelings of inferiority. He abandoned him, just like how he abandoned the countless Archangels that were sacrificed to make Lucilius’ legacy.

He was a failure of a Supreme Primarch, he thinks, as he gazes at Sandalphon’s unmoving form, as he gazes at the broken face of the current Supreme Primarch.

When the Singularities enter the room along with the Girl in Blue and the Red Dragon, it dawns on Lucifer that no one can see him. After a moment of talking, Halluel and Malluel appear to carry them out of the crumbling temple. 

He’s left alone in the silent halls of Canaan. Standing there, he looks at the spot where Sandalphon stood, right next to his still and cold body. Just looking at it gives him a sense of wrongness, like he’s watching a film and that thing on the floor wasn’t the body he used to inhibit.

Lucifer doesn’t keep track of how much time passes as he stands—floats?—there, watching as the temple crumbles around him. The sacred temple cracks piece by piece, falling from their places and breaking upon impact with the ground. It’s only after a few moments does he blink out of existence again, appearing in the room where the cradle used to rest.

(He misses the footsteps of a Fallen he wanted to befriend. He doesn’t see as his body is disturbed from its spot on the ground, falling into hands that carry it unusually delicately.)

The cradle is open as expected, white feathers scattered about the place. A few of them are swallowed into the abyss when the floor cracks open, but he doesn’t pay attention to it. Instead, he floats forward and reaches out to touch the leftover feathers.

His hand slips right through, freezing in place right where he should be touching the texture of feathers. He pulls back after a moment, ignoring the agonised groaning of the collapsing temple.

He stays there until the last glow from the cradle fades. A few pieces of the temple bury it and his vision is blocked by smoke. The feeling in his heart rivals the smoke in the air, the gas swallowing him whole. His chest constricts with a feeling he can’t identify, causing him to open his mouth, but he has no knowledge of what to do after such an action.

He closes it without voicing anything, chained down by inaction even in death. The feeling becomes unbearable in the end, and he dissipates along with the grey smoke of the crumbling temple.

He had explored the Sky Realm after he calmed down, and quickly learned several things. That no one can see or sense him, and that if he felt too many things at once, he would lose this form and disappear until he calmed down.

But the one he focuses on the most is that he can’t touch anything despite being able to see and smell and hear. It reminds him of his duty, and the chains of it all feel like they’re still rattling.

So it certainly takes him by surprise when he feels different one day. It’s the seventh day since the day he was assassinated, and it’s the first time he feels himself disappear without his volition. When he opens his eyes, he’s immediately aware that he’s seeing the world differently.

He sees one side of the greenery around him in one eye, and another side of it in another. Only a small portion of his field of vision overlaps. He has wings too, two pure white ones that seem too small compared to what he had. Looking down at the convenient pool of water in front of him, he finally realises what happened.

Lucifer is currently possessing the body of a pure white dove. Disregarding his beak, his eyes are a familiar blue colour. Being in the body of an animal should feel foreign, but all he feels is this strange tugging thread inside him. It urges him to fly, to go somewhere.

It feels as if it’s urging him to go home. He’s never had a place to call home, and had just moved from the labs to Canaan when the time called for it. Yet he still listens to the tugging thread and spreads his wings.

Flying in the body of a bird is not unlike how he flies when he was still alive. The feeling of feathers cutting against the wind is still the same, the backdrop of blue is still the same. Despite his new sense of vision, he focuses on the tugging thread instead.

He starts to understand when he sees the gold and blue wings of the Grandcypher. The ship looks as marvellous as the day he first saw it upgraded with the help of countless different people striving to save the Sky Realm together. The weather is nice, not too sunny nor too windy, so it explains the amount of people littered on the deck of the ship.

The amount of unique people being around each other creates a strange mixture of various colours, from light blue to a deep red. Seeing it from above makes him feel strangely unwell, just like how he feels when he sees the other Archangels casually interacting with each other.

He doesn’t have time to dwell on it as the thread tugs harder, as if it’s insistent now that he’s closer. It’s strange to be so focused on going home, when he doesn’t have one to begin with, but a part buried deep inside of him knows that it’s not a matter of where, it’s a matter of who.

Other people on the ship spotting him would hinder his progress, so instead of going into the lower decks via the main stairs, Lucifer chooses to fly through an open window. The room he enters is fortunately empty and the door left open.

He flies through the empty corridors, following the direction that the thread pulls at him from. He’s forced to dodge when a small girl reaches her hand out to try and touch him as he flies, but he doesn’t meet any further trouble.

The tugging gets stronger as he gets closer, until it feels like it’s beating like a fully functioning core. He leaves a few stray white feathers in his hurry, but he ignores them as the beats grow ever louder. By the time he squeezes himself into what he can smell is the galley of the ship, the rhythm is the only thing he can hear, the sounds ringing in his ears.

Lucifer peeks from his hiding spot to see Sandalphon standing against the counter as he watches something with intense red eyes. The scent of coffee is drifting through the air, evidently coming from the coffee dripper that Sandalphon is watching. Lucifer almost doesn’t want to disturb him, but the rhythm in his ears is deafening at this point.

He listens to his core for once and hops out of his hiding spot in time with the beat. Avoiding Sandalphon’s line of sight and making as little noise as possible, Lucifer flies over and gently lands on Sandalphon’s head.

The movement from Sandalphon is immediate, but not rough enough to throw him off. It’s nothing more than a startle, just lifting his head a little before stopping as if having second thoughts. Deeming it safe for now, Lucifer settles down into his soft hair, making sure his sharp claws don’t dig into anything so he would not hurt him.

A quiet moment passes, the only sound in the room is the drip drop of coffee into a waiting jug. The tugging has gone silent, and a sense of contentment fills Lucifer from the tips of his claws to the end of his beak. A deep, buried part of him whispers into his ears that it won’t last long.

Of course, the whisper proves itself to be true.

Sandalphon’s head suddenly jerks to one side and Lucifer almost falls off. He instinctively holds on by sinking his claws into the brown curls, pulling them as he flaps his wings.

Sandalphon lets out a hiss of pain, then shouts, “Get off of me!”

A hand comes in and almost swats him away, but he lets go and flies away as quickly as his little white wings can take him. He lands on the windowsill and turns to look back with his wings still extended.

The red glare filled with annoyance is all it takes for him to flap his wings and fly out of the ship. He should feel better now that the tugging is gone, but now all he feels is a strange sense of emptiness. He feels his small white wings become heavier.

Even with these borrowed wings, he still feels trapped. It seems even in death, he’s still not given the freedom he quietly longs for. Is this his penance for being a perfect creation that killed the one who gave him life?

(Even after the head had fallen, words still came out of the mouth. Even after he reaffirmed his belief both to himself and to the Astral on the ground, the severed head still had the last laugh.)

The further away from the Grandcypher he gets, the quieter the warmth gets. By the time Lucifer notices how far away he has gotten, the scene around him is nothing but the blue of never-ending skies.

In contrast to the colour around him, he can’t get the colour of red out of the forefront of his mind. Sandalphon’s cold red glare is practically burnt into the back of his eyelids, maybe even imprinted onto the skin on his back like the scars of six white wings.

That will be the last glimpse of Sandalphon he will be given. He knows this fact in the heart of his core as he flies until he no longer feels the wind against his feathers.

After that event, he makes sure to keep track of the days. After mustering up the last of his power and relaying his message to the Singularities, he watches many things happen on different islands with the rest of his time.

Children playing in the public square without a care in the world, people celebrating festivals with stalls that both teach and sell goods, special occasions where people in taverns sit down and drink the night away. Watching it happen right in front of him is a very different experience compared to watching the tiny figures from high above the sky.

When he’s this close to them, he can feel the energy that they radiate. The energy is so strong he even feels like he wants to join in, so he has to frequently remind himself that he isn’t able to.

It’s until the forty-ninth day does he feel like something unusual happens again to his current state. As he stands at the side of the bustling road, he begins to feel lighter.

Looking down, he pauses to process what is happening. The tips of his feet seem to be disappearing, breaking down like light magic dissolving into the dark. Lucifer tries to will himself to still exist in this Realm, where the skies are blue and still contains people he loves.

It doesn’t help. He can only watch as the rest of his body follows the same procedure in disappearing, slowly eating away at his limbs until they are no more. It continues until he can no longer feel most of his non-physical body, even if there was nothing much to feel in the first place.

Lucifer takes one last look at the people walking around and going about their daily lives. After tucking the sight into a safe corner in his mind, he chooses to close his eyes. A wave of calm hits him at the same time he accepts his fate. Just like that time in Canaan, there is nothing he can do.

When he feels himself appear somewhere else, he finally lets himself open his eyes. He is greeted by nothing but white, even if he spins and turns around in place. The air is not cold nor is it hot, and the only sound he can hear is the definite ringing in his ears. He doesn’t know where he is, but somewhere inside his core he _knows_ where he is.

He’s read about this before, in a book written by Skydwellers a long time ago. They wrote that after death, spirits are sent to the other side, where the only time they are able to visit is when the gates open during the festival known as Halloween. They reside there until they are ready to move on and be reborn.

But this is nothing like the other side he has read about. The world should be similar to the living world without the same colour, but what he floats in is nothing but an empty white space.

Something flashes in the corner of his eye, and Lucifer turns to see a spirit just like himself, floating just above the ground.

He floats over to the spirit, an elderly human, and opens his mouth to speak, “Hello, do you know where we are?”

The human doesn’t respond, doesn’t even turn to look at Lucifer in the first place. They seem to be looking in a specific direction, and after a moment, starts moving in that direction.

Lucifer remains in his spot and doesn’t try to call out to the spirit again, watching them until they disappear from his view. He doesn’t move, and forces himself to observe when he sees something else appear in the distance.

The thing that appears is nothing but a ball of light, something that doesn’t have a form yet. It moves from left to right, as if looking around, before seemingly choosing a direction to follow. It floats away, just like the previous spirit.

It takes another spirit appearing until he understands that whatever place this is, it must be a stop for souls. Some that don’t have an appearance, and some that do. Perhaps it is the first and last stop for them?

He can only take calculated guesses. After all, there is nothing for him here to ask and gain answers from.

Lucifer closes his eyes, a sudden sense of yearning for the place that gave him tranquillity where there was nowhere else. When he opens his eyes, the white nothingness is replaced by the garden in his memories.

He can’t tell if it is merely an illusion, or if it’s actually real, but he appreciates the place nonetheless.

He sees the coffee trees against the white clouds and blue skies, but the white clouds do not move and the coffee trees lack the life that should be flowing in them. He sees the white roof with white garden chairs and walks towards them, but the underside of the roof is dusty and the chair lacks signs of use.

Everything is similar to what he remembers of the garden, yet it is not the same. It lacks something that Lucifer can’t find the words for.

But even if it is not the same, even if he doesn’t know enough about this place, he will wait here for Sandalphon. For however long it takes, he will wait.

(If this is truly a place of rest for those burdened with sentience, then Lucifer prefers to not know of the fact. He knows why he is here, but thinking about it or speaking about it would prove to be too much.

Is this what they call ‘denial’?)

It would be for the best for him to still be the Supreme Primarch, for when he meets Sandalphon again. And so he closes his eyes and counts to ten.

He will be the Supreme Primarch just for Sandalphon, and only when he is alone once again, will he give himself the freedom of showing these emotions he knows not the name of.


End file.
